DISCLAIMER: This is a little disorganized and colloquial and I don’t know anything about music, not really, I just like listening to it!!!
BRAT, Charli xcx’s sixth studio album, released on 7 June 2024. I listened to it for the first time that afternoon, walking home from work, and while I liked it I wasn’t immediately hooked. I’m never able to give my full attention to music when I’m walking, so this isn’t surprising. However, after a month and several more full-listens, BRAT has solidified itself as one of my favorite albums of the summer — and quite possibly the entire year.
Over the course of BRAT’s fifteen tracks — a 41:23 minute runtime — Charli creates a world that is loud, fast, bouncy, and undeniably hot, paying homage to the London rave scene where she started her career. BRAT also maintains a certain wholeness throughout its entirety that is, frankly, inspiring. Held together by the production and artistic vision, Charli’s voice cuts in, out, and across the album, repeating themes from different angles and sliding seamlessly from upbeat to downbeat and back again.
BRAT’s central “brattiness” lies in its defiance to be any one thing you might want it to be while simultaneously fulfilling every unthought desire we, as listeners, could possibly have for it. BRAT is an album that can’t be reduced to a line of typed-out lyrics or a snippet of auto-tune chop, nor written-off as merely emblematic of its genre; it has to be experienced. The subject matter of this album — ego & fame, the beginnings of love, social & body insecurities, career (un)fulfillment, female friendship, grief, regret, family — and the intimacy and honesty with which it is conveyed warrant it a second and third listen.
Kind of on that note, kind of on a tangent: I’ve seen two different essays reference BRAT and conversations around “girlhood” in the same breath, and while I understand what both essays meant the term still bothers me. (btw I’m not linking the essays because I’m not saying this to bash these writers. I’m bringing it up to make a larger criticism that these writers just happen to exemplify in this scenario.) If we’re going to hail BRAT for its realism and stature, then why reduce our commentary on it to an online buzzword? Because, let’s be honest, BRAT is not about girlhood. It’s about womanhood. And, more generally, it’s about adulthood. Sure, it’s a cyclical album, and on multiple songs Charli does express a desire to “rewind,” but this is a desire fueled by her frustrations with society/culture and not some nostalgic desire to heal her inner child!!!!!!
Using “girl” in lyrics that are meant to be personal, real, and mirror what Charli would (and as “the girl, so confusing version with lorde” proves, actually did) say to her female friends makes sense. Analysis (and even just commentary), however, should understand the difference between girl as a mode of language and girl as a particular developmental state.
Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, let’s take it track by track with some quick thoughts, impressions, and general notes for each song.
TRACK 1: 360
From the very first line, Charli lets us know that this album is wholly hers (a departure from her previous album Crash): “I went my own way and I made it / I’m you’re favorite reference, baby.” The song builds through the verse to the chorus, with a brief drop right before: “Yeah, 360 / When you're in the mirror, do you like what you see? / When you're in the mirror, you're just looking at me,” a lyric which can be read both as a biting call-out to imitators (an amorphous “you” who is so inspired by her), and also just Charli feeling herself. The brash self-assuredness of the track (“If you love it, if you hate it / I don't f*cking care what you think” ) leaves space for both, as Charli is everywhere and everything in this song.
This is the kind of song that you put on when you have ten minutes to make a twenty minute walk, or, aptly, what you might listen to as you prepare for a night out — it has the promise of something harder without punishing you out of the gate and leaves you wanting more.
TRACK 2: Club classics
This track deserves its title. It promises to make you “dance all night, that’s right / all night / never gonna stop till the morning light,” and indeed if you weren’t moving to 360, you will be to this. I love the ego of this song, love the dark and heavy synth throughout but especially during the outro when Charli sings the line “I wanna dance to me / when I go to the club“ over and over, with all the noise fading momentarily, her voice cutting through high and clear, before slamming back in.
TRACK 3: Sympathy is a knife
Musically, this track is BOUNCY! From a lyrical perspective, it’s a doozy. For a song that is ostensibly about Taylor Swift (who is in my opinion one of the most hyperreal and therefore unrelateable celebrities/musicians/billionaires on the planet right now) and the insecurities close contact with her introduces to Charli, this track is extremely dark, emotional, and direct. I say this like it’s surprising because, to me, it is. When (on the very next track) Charli sings “I’m famous but not quite / but I’m perfect for the background / one foot in a normal life,” I believe her; when I think of Taylor Swift, I cannot conceive of her as a real human being. When I do remember that she is real, in the little breaths of “Sympathy is a knife,” I try to understand the pressure of it, how the weight of her celebrity and success must have an effect on anyone in the music industry, how sharing a physical space with her must make comparison impossible to avoid and impossible to cope with, how she could inspire a song as cutting and raw as this.
Compared to the first two tracks, the delivery in verse one of “Sympathy is a knife” is less rushed, the lyrics riding less easily on the wave of sound. Everything opens up at the chorus, yet its heavy “Why I can’t even grit my teeth and lie? / I feel all these feelings I can’t control” grounds it. There’s another drop before verse two, which gives me whiplash as it moves from “Why I wanna buy a gun? / Why I wanna shoot myself? Volatile, at war with my dialogue / I’d say that there was a God if they could stop this / wild voice tearing me apart / I’m so apprehensive now” to “Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show / fingers crossed behind my back / I hope they break up quick.” Like, sheesh, I totally forgot what this song was about for a second! This multitudinousness is characteristic of the entire album; the contrast is just especially sharp for me in this song.
The vocal effects in the outro make you feel like you’re in a big empty room with Charli bouncing everywhere across it, building and collapsing, until the solitary relief of the last line (a synthed out Charli singing “Oh no, oh no”) closes the track.
TRACK 4: I might say something stupid
“I might say something stupid” might have the fewest lyrics of the album, but it wastes no time getting into them. If Charli’s insecurities on the previous track were about a specific person and situation, track four expresses a general insecurity that permeates social situations where she feels out of place and overcompensates to force a feeling of belonging. On this track, Charli wears her clothes as a disguise, sips her wine when she gets nervous, snags her tights; she plays the role of the messiest person at the party because she never feels like the most beautiful, most interesting, or most ______ person in the room; she diminishes.
The bass is steady and what I would call “doomy” — a fitting sonic landscape for those times when Charli is frozen and uncertain (she repeats throughout, “I go so cold, I go so cold”). There’s this little bit between the chorus and verse two (around the 0:50 mark) that is so so good. The auto-tuning on this track sounds like the lovechild of a voice crack and a sigh in the best way possible. The end comes abruptly, Charli’s voice alone, hanging into silence; “I don’t know if I belong here anymore, I—”
TRACK 5: Talk talk
After building through verse one, this track becomes a bouncy castle. It’s thumping, bumping, and also a little nervous. Direct from Charli, this track is about a specific moment when she and her now fiancé (George Daniel, music producer and drummer for The 1975) were not together but very much into each other. They were both at the NME Awards, sitting at different tables, and had been texting each other but not really hanging out in person. In her words: “we were both, like, looking over at each other, it was very, like, one of us would look, the other one would look away, and then vice versa, and you know when you just feel like someone’s watching you? You can feel, like, a hole burning in the back of your head or something like that? It was very much that moment.”
“Talk talk” perfectly captures this feeling of uncertain beginning, both exciting and frustrating. The co*ckiness of “Are you thinking ‘bout me? / I’m kind of thinking you are” is followed immediately with the confessional “I followed you to the bathroom / but then I felt crazy / I’m feeling like I’m on fire” (again, based on that NME Award event).
TRACK 6: Von dutch
This track is brash and bold, and I love it. This is a song that should be listened to in the car, on the highway, going fifteen over the speed limit, or in a club when it feels like you’re speeding down the highway. It sounds like adrenaline, pushing against you, forcing you up and up and up, like, yeah, I do need to put my hands up, Charli is my Number One. But it’s also relentless, feeling like I’ll do anything for a bit of relief at the end of this, god can this amazing song end so I can go to the bathroom without feeling like I’m missing something, get a drink of water, pop out of the club a minute for some fresh air, etc.
The chorus is so good you’ll be glad to hear it twice. It’s also crazy catchy, so you’ll keep hearing it in your head for hours after. Enjoy!!!!!!!
TRACK 7: Everything is romantic
Per Charli, this track is Italian, aperol, romantic, Pompeii, lace curtains.
Here, BRAT gets slower and softer, but still tinged with something darker. I love the strings that swell before Charli’s voice comes in at the beginning and overall the instrumentals on this are some of my favorite in the entire album. I love the way the song falls out from under you going into the first verse with a cut up, choppy, synthy backing, and the layers of stuttery vocal effects. Throughout there are sounds of electronic water(?), lots of static, and something I can only describe as low-poly video game effects. And then verse two gives us this choral backing that builds and builds behind Charli’s voice until it starts to fry during the outro that is roughly 1/3 of the song’s runtime, in which she repeats “Fall in love again and again” again and again. The sentiment that everything is romantic starts to fall apart, the words repeated until they start to lose meaning — but I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing! On the one hand, this suggests the largeness of such feelings, the enormity of the promise that everything is romantic. On the other hand, it hints at the way life is never allowed to be just romantic. Inevitably, reality creeps into the fantasy. Personally, I think the romanticism wins out over the fatalism, but to each listener their own.
Also whatever is going on in the last fifteen seconds, where it sounds like rain on a roof — GOD! — it’s so very good.
TRACK 8: Rewind
Yes, the track called “Rewind” utilizes the rewind sound effect. And it’s brilliant. This track is unstable. It has claps that sound like slaps. There’s a punchiness to the incredibly honest “I used to never think about Billboard / But, now, I've started thinking again / Wondering 'bout whether I think I deserve commercial success.” Charli’s voice is deliciously chopped up in the outro and then the song just. ends. like going off the edge of a cliff! and we slide into the next song — oh wait, no, this is the same track! Wait, can we rewind and hear that again?
TRACK 9: So I
In memoriam of Charli’s friend and collaborator, the late artist SOPHIE, “So I” references the track “It’s Okay To Cry" off her singular 2017 album OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES both lyrically and sonically. This track is a beautiful and fitting tribute to both their professional relationship and personal friendship. It’s wonderfully honest, with little admissions made in parentheses. The grief (and guilt and regret) are present, but mostly, on this track, I feel the love. It’s made me cry twice.
TRACK 10: Girl, so confusing
On track ten, Charli breaks down her confusing relationship to another female artist she has been compared to because of similarities in their looks and in spite of them not actually having much in common. The steady thumping bass is overlaid with all kinds of hazy, destabilizing effects, dropping away briefly before piling back on for the chorus. The chorus — repeated three times in the song — is marked by Charli’s repetition of “girl,” one word that holds a million aborted sentences.
The power of “Girl, so confusing” is that it is more than an attention-grabbing song — one written with lyrics referential enough for fans to (correctly) speculate on its subject but vague enough for deniability — and is instead a wide open door. Through that invitation, the track sparked real conversation. Charli and the track’s original subject, singer/songwriter Lorde, really did “work it out on the remix,” creating a song together that is so honest and intimate it stands out in the music landscape.
TRACK 11: Apple
As an album, BRAT has very little lyrical fat. It’s lean, direct, and to the point; it feels intimate because it doesn’t hide behind flowery language or metaphor. Apple is unique in that sense because it is more metaphorical, but still plenty straightforward — it expands on the idiom “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” building on the metaphor to address not only the similarities we inherit from our parents (“‘Cause I’ve been looking at you for so long / now I only see me), but also more generally the difficulties that come with trying to navigate familial relationships.
Given that Charli grapples with the idea of starting a family on track 14, admitting that she thinks about it all the time, it’s unsurprising that BRAT also includes reflections on her relationship to her parents and her heritage, the family tree from which her apple fell. In verse two, she addresses this, singing “I wanna grow the apple, keep all the seeds,” suggesting that if/when she starts her own family, she wants her parents to be involved. At the same time, she “can’t help but get so angry” when she’s around them, always wanting to leave the situation.
Although Charli decides the apple is “rotten right to the core / from all the things passed down” in verse three, the outro rebounds to the biggest question of all, one which begs for closeness: “I wanna know where you go / When you’re feeling alone / When you’re feeling alone, do you?”
Charli has said that she thinks “Apple” will be a bit of a sleeper hit. I tend to agree with her.
Musical things I love about it: the little duh duh duh at the beginning; the distortion around 1:00; the breathy interlude; the car you can hear speeding up in the background, so perfect for a song that is about running and also returning.
TRACK 12: B2b
“B2b” is crunchy and it comes at you fast, giving just a moment’s warning before it arrives. It is lyrically relentless, trapping you in an onslaught of repeated lines — “Back to, back to, back to, back to you / I don't wanna fall right back to us / Maybe you should run right back to her / I don’t wanna go back, back to” — that give voice to the vicious cycle Charli’s thoughts are stuck in.
This unease is backed by a chilling siren that wouldn’t be out of place on a horror or thriller movie’s soundtrack, asking an oppressively constant question with no answer in sight. Around 1:40 another siren joins in, dropping off for a little bit of relief before the verse “Took a long time / breaking muscle down / building muscle up / repeating it.” Then there’s the breathy admission of the bridge: “I don’t wanna feel feelings.”
If you took a panic attack and made it sexy and also a song, I imagine it would sound something like this.
TRACK 13: Mean girls
The first second of this track physically hurts my ears and I LOVE IT! Its bounciness is a haughty superiority underpinned with a grit of doubt. The syncopated piano interlude around 1:30 is sooo good. It’s got depth and character and I love how it gets mixed up halfway through the outro, building into the synthy chords that take us back to the curb or the large room half-empty between sets where we started.
TRACK 14: I think about it all the time
The verse has this incredible tempo to it, a kind of long-short-long-short-short-short-short-long that I can’t pin down. There’s another kind of cycle in this song, like “B2b” and “Rewind,” but one that spirals upward instead of downward. This song, with its anxieties about the future, takes a bigger perspective (“'Cause my career feels so small / In the existential scheme of it all”).
As Charli wonders about starting a family and how it might change everything, you can feel her looking at her life as a series of branching possibilities, all rushing past, and the panic that is building beneath the excitement. The harsh clickiness of the second verse going into the refrain is superb. The outro stands all by itself in silence, the titular “I think about it all the time.”
Track 15: 365
“365” cannibalizes (remixes) BRAT’s first track. It’s a song to be played at the end of a long night out. It’s basem*nt music. It’s boiler room music. It sounds best closer to dawn than to dusk.
If 360 brings to mind a straight line, a spin that returns to its starting position, 365 suggests a calendar year, another cycle just hidden in the guise of temporal progression. We’ve shifted (that +5 is significant) but not to something completely different. Another small detail which holds the cycle is that this final track is the first time Charli lyrically references the title: “Who the f*ck are you? I'm a brat when I'm bumpin' that / Now I wanna hear my track, are you bumpin' that?”
I have no further notes on this one, just Charli’s own walk-through which is linked below. In case you don’t want to watch it, my one highlight would be her description of the vocals at the end of “365” as having wasted down to “hellish memories.” Fun!
Happy one month of BRAT — have some stats to celebrate!!!
**Note that Spotify (and maybe also last.fm but I’m not sure) aggregates plays from singles/eps with the same track on fully released albums. “Von dutch” was the first single released off of BRAT (29 February), followed by “Club classics” and “B2b” (3 April), and finally “360” (10 May). This partially explains the huge jump in the number of plays between the left and right side of the chart, but I think it’s still interesting.
To close this out, have a hot take from Charli (which I strongly agree with):
